Posted on February 12, 2007 at 3:55 pm

Stephen Holden’s review here.

MUSIC REVIEW | JASON ROBERT BROWN
A Composer Sells His Songs and Himself

JRBAllenRoom.jpg
Photograph by JULIEN JOURDES

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: February 12, 2007

The composer Jason Robert Brown has the drive of a musical commando groomed for combat in the training camp where Broadway babies, art song composers and acolytes of Billy Joel and Randy Newman jostle for promotion. Mr. Brown has a little bit of all these influences in his songs, along with a disarming candor about his contradictory image as a cocky borderline geek.

As part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series on Friday at the Allen Room, he mustered his troops — the bassist Randy Landau and Gary Sieger (nicknamed the Caucasian Rhythm Kings), the Juilliard Choral Union and two guest singers, Laura Benanti and Rozz Morehead — to mount an aggressive talent offensive.

Although Mr. Brown, 36, has had a show on Broadway (“Parade”), and his Off Broadway show “The Last Five Years” is a staple of regional theater, he is still waiting for the Big One. There’s no telling whether his current work in progress, a musical adaptation of the 1992 film “Honeymoon in Vegas,” will emerge as his “Rent” or his “Hairspray.” But if the quality of songs like “When You Say Vegas” and “Anywhere but Here,” both heard on Friday, is an indication, it could be a contender.

“When You Say Vegas” is especially winning because it combines the brassy strut of a cheerleading theme song like “New York, New York” and “I Love L.A.” with hilarious double-entendres; it’s tongue-in-cheek ur-Vegas. “Anywhere but Here,” sung by Ms. Benanti, is a marriage-minded woman’s sharp, poignant warning to her commitment-phobic longtime boyfriend that time is running out.

Unlike Adam Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon and other theater composers with whom he is often lumped, Mr. Brown is blunt pop communicator. His most commercial songs suggest a theatrical extension of the 1970s Billy Joel, whose influence permeates his high-powered pop-jazz pianism. Even when he vocally faltered on high notes, Mr. Brown delivered his songs from the inside out.

He ended the program with his song “Someone to Fall Back On,” a pop ballad in the classic mode of “Just the Way You Are” or “The Wind Beneath My Wings”:

I am no prince,
I am no saint,
I am not anyone’s wildest dream.
But I can stand behind
And be someone to fall back on.

When was the last time a man’s declaration of love expressed abject humility?